There is a big fucken snivel-fest going on over at DrugMonkey about how terrible it is for universities to increase the number of PhDs they award in the natural sciences and how morally correct it is for institutions to decrease their admission of PhD students, because there are not enough jobbes as faculty or other researcher positions for the number of PhDs produced. This is a total load of arrant bullshitte.

“Overproduction of PhDs” is a demonstrably false claim:

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

The unemployment rate for PhDs in 2011 was 2.5%, and the median weekly earnings were $1551 (> $80,000 per year). This is much greater than any other level of educational attainment other than professional degrees (law, medicine, etc). There is only “overproduction of PhDs” if you assume that PhDs are only being produced to become faculty members who go on to train additional PhDs.

If there was “overproduction of PhDs”, then PhDs wouldn’t be making so much more money than almost anyone else. And considering that in the natural sciences, you get your PhD for free–and even get paid while doing so–it is an excellent deal.

My institution is intentionally and explicitly following a policy of increasing the number of PhD students in the biomedical sciences, in part by actually devoting hard institutional dollars to the support of PhD students, and rightfully so.

The fact that many institutions are cutting back their production of PhDs for fiscal reasons is far from salutary, and in the long run is going to severely harm the competitiveness of the US economy as compared to other advanced and developing economies whose politics aren’t grossly distorted by deranged racist misogynist white jeezus-freak lunatics.

My university has contracted with Google for provisioning of Google Apps–including GMail–under the URLs and branding of our institution. It is also going to be completely free of any advertising, data mining, or any other use of user information by Google. According to what we have been told, this several-year contract does not involve payment of any fees by the university to Google.

The only thing I can think of that has this deal make sense for Google is that it will demand fees going forward when renewing the contract. Is there any other reason Google would provide these services to my university without charging fees, and without being able to serve ads or mine user data?

I’m a rich fucker. Not superrich flying around in a goddamn fucken private jet or any shitte like that, but I don’t worry about money. And I am fucken eager to pay more taxes so we can live in a decent fucken country, and not some fucken third0world hellhole. So what the fucken fucke is uppe with the fucken gross greed of the other motherfuckers like me, who would sell their own fucken mothers into slavery to upgrade their goddamn fucken 300 series beemer into a 400 series.